Outlook app with interactive notifications now available to all Windows 10 users

About two weeks ago, the Office team pushed an update for the folks enrolled in the Windows Insider program; the update added quite a few significant features and it is now rolling out to every Windows 10 user.

The benefit of keeping app and operating system updates separate are two-fold.

Users can be delivered more frequent app updates and without bloating or waiting for the operating system; yet very few companies do this – Apple still updates most of its apps with the annual iOS updates, while Google only started splitting its apps away from the Android OS very recently.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has had experience in this regard – considering they own the most popular consumer operating system around.

The Outlook

The version number for the previous Insider build was 17.7466.40627.0, today’s update bumps it to 17.7466.41147.0 and isn’t limited to just Insiders.

The app has been updated since we last saw it – the features, however, are the same; perhaps it were the bugs that caused all the version jumps.

Features include interactive notifications, pop out emails – yes they were not removed for the final build – and @mentions for contacts from your accounts.

The Mail & Calendar app was built from scratch with UWP, as a simpler (and free) alternative to the full-fledged Outlook app. Hopefully, these features will come to the full-fledged Outlook app in the Office suite at some point – that doesn’t even have interactive notifications yet.